W. H. AUDEN’S POETIC SENSE OF HISTORY

Abstract

The essay focuses on the part of W. H. Auden’s poetry that demonstrates his lifelong interest in history. The analysis starts with the poems composed during the 1930s that reveal Auden’s historical affinity and strengthen his reputation as a modernist poet. The attention is then drawn to the poems included in the collection entitled Homage to Clio (1960) which show Auden’s deep insight into the crucial aspects of historiography that in modernist epoch took quite an unexpected turn. Auden’s denial of historicism, seen as a part of Nietzschean heritage, is correlated with T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s meditations on the problems of history and tradition. The poems we analyzed refer to the problem of the malleability of historical truth, traditional, objectivist vs. idealistic and uncritical historiography and the gradual degradation of the classic idea of history embodied by Clio. In spite of the fact that Auden did not offer any new concept of history the touch of his poetic genius, magnificently displayed in his musings on history, makes them the true monuments of his epoch.